Human beings naturally enjoy interacting in social groups, mutually sharing their knowledge and experience, as well as exhibiting competitive behaviour in order to define a hierarchy of respect within the social groups. Such interaction occurs in many different contexts, amongst which are included competitive sports and competitive games, including electronic games requiring player skill and aptitude. Within a given social group, it is not sufficient for a given individual merely to try to assert their position within a given hierarchy of the given social group, but requires evidence of a given degree of skill in playing games having been achieved. Similar parallels are to be found in physical sports by awarding of medals in recognition of independently-verified performance having been achieved, for example Olympic gold medals.
Electronic games are susceptible to being played within social groups, either with multiple users playing temporally simultaneously or by multiple users playing at mutually different times and then comparing their attained results, for example highest achieved scores, when playing the electronic games. However, merely comparing attained scores is not regarded socially as being most exciting, whereas highlights of game-playing resulting in highest achieved scores being achieved both proves attainment of the highest scores, as well as being inspiration to other players for improving their skills and game playing technique.
In practice, considerable time is potentially expended playing electronic games, such that recording such game-playing experiences results in considerable recorded content, which, for example, needs to be edited to filter out therefrom game playing highlights which might be of interest and inspiration to other players of the game. At present, facilities for providing such identification of highlights are not sufficiently well developed.
In U.S. Pat. No. 8,187,104B, there is described a system and method for creating, editing, and sharing video content pertaining to video game events. The method results in a relatively limited amount of metadata associated with video content pertaining to video game events being generated for enabling the events to be edited and shared with other users. For example, one set of metadata is generated which describes a game-playing encounter, instead of a stream of metadata events; the set of metadata allows mapping of metadata events directly to a timeline through one or more timestamps included in the set of metadata, thereby enabling features beneficial to implementing automated editing of recorded video content to identify interesting moments within the recorded video content based in the set of metadata.
Thus, summarizing above, sharing game-playing experiences of an original player as multiple linked streams of video content, audio content and game data enables other players to replay and thereby appreciate the original player's game-playing experiences. For contemporary electronic games, it takes a long time to replay gaming-experiences for many such games, resulting in recorded game-playing experiences of long viewing duration. Moreover, a problem encountered in practice is that it is difficult and time-consuming for a given player to edit his/her game-playing experience to include only certain types of events, for example based upon their potential interest or appeal to other players to whom the game-playing experience is to be presented. Moreover, it is also difficult for other players replaying game-playing experiences of other players to discover relevant game-playing experiences, or sub-parts thereof, by reviewing algebraic or social recommendations that are imprecise or difficult to interpret. Furthermore, contemporary searching for interesting game-playing experiences is difficult because game-playing experiences can only be searched using text descriptions entered manually by a given player desirable to appreciate other players' experiences. Additionally, even if the aforesaid difficulties are overcome, it is difficult to navigate within a given game-playing experience identified by aforementioned searching, to find interesting parts to watch.
Many game-playing experiences include events that are not immediately obvious to a casual observer, wherein the events may not be properly appreciated without graphical- or textural-highlights to draw the casual observer's attention to event detail; such graphical- or textural-highlights are beneficially implemented by way of momentary annotations and similar. Moreover, a given game-playing experience can be improved by the game-playing replaying includes visualizations of other sensor data, for example touch, microphone-captured sounds, movement sensors and similar.
A further problem encountered with contemporary game-playing systems is that video game players desire to define themselves in a content of a given type of video game and compare themselves with other players of the same game. Comparing high-level information, for example a given player's high scores and achievements when playing the given game, provides a way of comparing the given player's performance with that of other players, but provides relatively little comparative information, for example gaming prowess, style of game-playing, and preferences when playing the given game. Such limitations when contemporarily making comparisons between players hinders the given player trying to connect with other players within or among a social network, for example other players who are interesting to competing again in a given social network or whose game-playing experiences are interesting to watch and appreciate.